appropriately performed by Mr. Miller. But his
supreme effort, suiting as it did his natural
bent, was Trim, in Steele's Funeral, or Grief
à la Mode.

Mark what happened in the year seventeen
hundred and thirty-eight, and in the month of
August. Mr. Miller died, leaving a widow.
The question was, what was to become of her?
Such questions will arise when tangible estate
dies with the owner. In this case, however, the
departed left a name, and an acute publisher
found the answer in that name.

This was an epoch when the public had a
sweet tooth for dead players' jokes.
Consequently, dead players' jokes were the only
articles of this special description worthy their
paper and print; singular as it may appear, no
man, unless perchance he was a dead player,
joked in those days. If we might take certain
title-pages upon trust, these dead players were
a marvellously mercurial race, making, during
their whole lives' time, hoards of the primest fun,
and not letting a soul have the faintest inkling of
it until they were fairly under ground. Of these
jest-books, previously put out by the hearse-load,
none were so popular as Spiller's Jests
and Pinkethman's (elliptically Pinkey's) Jests.

What was mortal of Mr. Miller had been
placed under a stone in St. Clement's churchyard,
Portugal-street. We proceed with the story
of his less perishable part — his name.

There was then established in Dogwell-court,
Whitefriars, a bookseller and stationer, named
Read: a person of a shrewd and speculative
turn of mind. Mr. Read was what we call not
a first-class publisher, yet a pushing man, most
valuable to literary gentlefolks-errant who were
in want of occasional jobs, or in possession, by
some rare piece of good fortune, of an idea
calculated to put small sums of money into their
own pockets, and large sums into Mr. Read's.

Whether Mr. Read himself originated the
notion that there was a good deal in Mr. Miller's
name quasi Dead Player, and spake on the
subject to a gentleman whom he believed able to
assist him ; or, whether it was the gentleman who
took the bold initiative, is not now ascertainable.
At any rate, enter Mr. Mottley. Mr. Mottley
had seen better days, and was just then seeing
very bad days. It had lately gone worse and
worse with him.

Mr. John Mottley — a real name, and not
a practical joke — was only son and heir of
John Mottley, lieutenant-colonel in the service
of his Sacred Majesty King James the Second,
and afterwards commandant of a regiment in
that of the most Christian monarch Louis the
Fourteenth, recommended for the post by his
Sacred Majesty King James, who had retired
from business to St. Germains, and referred
persons, applying for situations, elsewhere. The
colonel was unlucky enough to be killed in
seventeen hundred and six, at the battle of Turin.

Young Mottley does not seem, at any period
of his life, to have lain under particularly weighty
obligations to his father, the favourite of two
kings. His mother was no Jacobite, and from
the mother's friends, the Guises and Lord Howe,
he derived whatever means of support he ever
had, independently of literature. His father was
a spendthrift, and he did not very much care
whether it was his own money he ran through,
or somebody else's. His mother, a Guise by
birth, had a fortune of her own, and her father
at his death left her son, Mr. Read's casual
acquaintance, a second. The colonel all but
dissipated the one, and Mrs. Mottley's debts
swallowed up the other. Still, young John had
friends, who kept him alive and tolerably well
for several years on two splendid promises and
one small place in the Excise. Moreover, Lord
Halifax, during his lord treasurership, gave his
word to Mottley that he should be a commissioner
of wine licenses. The only circumstance
which prevented the fulfilment of the promise
was that, just before the place was to have been
patented to Mottley, somebody else got it.

John Mottley's next episode was a bit of
downright cruel dealing. In seventeen hundred
and twenty, Mr. Mottley resigned his emoluments
in the Excise, on being appointed by Sir
Robert Walpole an officer in the Exchequer.
He thought he had found smooth water at last.
But even when Mr. Mottley had become entitled
to draw no more than three days' pay, came the
Right Honourable Sir Robert Walpole's
compliments to Mr. Mottley, and was exceedingly
sorry he should only just have recollected that
the place was bespoken for Mr.——- somebody
else! It did not occur to the right honourable
gentleman that his honour was in any way
concerned in providing other employment for
Mottley, and the latter was thrown upon the
world simply destitute.

Bereft of all hope of aid from his own family,
abominably deluded by ministers, poor John
Mottley, broken down in health and spirits, was
reduced to the need of earning his bread how
he could. He wrote plays which were not
unsuccessful. Of four or so, he was the unassisted
author, and he was concerned in others. He
sold his talents to the booksellers. He became
acquainted with strange associates. His was
soon among the familiar faces at the coffee-houses
and other places of entertainment resorted to by
the wits and the literati of all grades.

It seemed as if Mottley were to be haunted by
that bad genius of his, ill-luck, to his life's end.
He had no sooner got into a fair connexion with
the theatres, than the gout took the use of his
right hand away, and thenceforth he was a
confirmed valetudinarian. Mottley was in this sad
predicament, crippled and half bedridden, when
one day, in seventeen hundred and thirty-nine,
quite early, Mr. Read, of Dogwell-court, called
on him touching a little literary business. It
was thought that it would be a profitable jest
to gather together all the good tilings about
town, put them into a shilling book, and make
the late Joe Miller, notoriously as impervious
to a joke as a Quaker, its foster-father. Mottley
would have been a name of names for the title-page,
one would have fancied; but Mr. Read
held differently. Mottley was not a dead player,
and Miller was. People who knew anything,
knew that the late Mr. Miller was one of the